The Global Childhood Factory: Inside the Quiet Takeover of the Early Years by Screens

From these glass towers to the narrow lanes of Banaras, from Bengaluru’s gated colonies to West Bengal’s small towns, I have seen the same exchange; the quiet outsourcing of care to screens. Across India, childhood now unfolds in pixels. Mothers balancing work and care hand over devices as if they were pacifiers of modernity. Across classes and geographies, the digital babysitter has become India’s newest family member.

Economist Ezequiel Molina, in Screen Time in Early Childhood Education: Balancing the Digital Scales (World Bank, 2025), calls this the new childhood economy. The report’s tone is clinical, but its findings—devastating: toddlers across the world now spend twice the World Health Organization’s recommended limit on screens. This is not a moral panic, Molina insists, but a developmental crisis. The family has become the first site of digital governance. Every notification that interrupts the simple act of a mother answering her child’s babble is, in economic terms, a transaction. Attention itself has entered the market.

Shoshana Zuboff once wrote of behavioral surplus: the extraction of data from our every move. Molina’s argument extends that logic inward. What is being mined now is the child’s neural plasticity. The very circuits that form language, empathy, and imagination are shaped by what developmental psychologists call “serve and return” interaction, the rhythmic back-and-forth of gaze, gesture, and speech. When a screen replaces that exchange, cognition does not simply pause. It rewires.

A Child Alone with a Screen

I often think of my distant relative’s son in Bengaluru, a four-year-old whose first words came late and whose sentences still arrive haltingly. Both parents work in the IT sector, often from home but always on calls. They love him fiercely. Yet their days are a relay of meetings, spreadsheets, and deadlines. The tablet fills the silence. What began as a distraction became a dependency. He now needs speech therapy twice a week. The therapist explains that his comprehension is intact, but his social mimicry, the instinct to repeat tones, gestures, rhythms, is blunted. He listens but does not respond. The device speaks for him.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation describes this as the great rewiring. Childhood, he argues, shifted from play-based to phone-based around 2012, when touchscreens entered toddler hands. The result was an unprecedented rise in anxiety, loneliness, and self-harm. Haidt draws a parallel with the replacement of outdoor, risky play by curated, indoor safety in late twentieth-century America. What safety does for the body, the screen does for the mind: it sterilizes experience. Children grow up fluent in images but illiterate in presence.

The phenomenon is not limited to cities. In Arunachal Pradesh, I have met tribal children whose first exposure to English words comes not from a teacher but from YouTube. In one Anganwadi center, a volunteer proudly showed me an educational app meant to “build vocabulary.” The toddlers repeated “apple, ball, cat” with the precision of a machine. Yet when I asked in Hindi or their local tongue what fruit they liked, many looked blank. The screen had taught recognition without relation.

The Politics of Attention

Attention is the new policy frontier. Molina’s report synthesizes over eighty studies from eighteen countries and identifies patterns that converge on one unsettling conclusion: early digital exposure alters brain development, language acquisition, attention regulation, and sleep cycles. The report’s innovation lies in how it turns these findings into behavioral governance. Parents are advised to identify cues that trigger screen use, replace them with if-then plans, restructure home environments, and build social accountability. The advice borrows from behavioral science: start with tiny habits, make them stick. What used to be moral guidance now becomes algorithmic protocol.

In other words, parenting is being nudged. This echoes the larger behavioral shift in global education policy since the World Development Report 2018. From how teachers mark attendance to how children brush their teeth, every act is framed as a data point that can be optimized. The home becomes a laboratory. The child becomes a feedback loop.

Byung-Chul Han, the Korean-German philosopher, might call this the disappearance of the Other. In his essay The Burnout Society, he warns that digital life dissolves distance, compressing time into perpetual availability. Without otherness, there is no encounter, no genuine play, only performance. The child staring at a tablet performs attention, but does not feel it. The parent watching from the side performs care but is elsewhere, tethered to another device.

When the Solution is More of the Same

Molina does not demonize technology. He acknowledges its paradox. AI parenting assistants on WhatsApp, smart screen operating systems, and digital coaching platforms can help parents create healthier media habits. Yet, as he hints, these very tools risk reproducing the logic they critique. To manage screen time, we invent more screens. To regulate attention, we outsource it further.

This is the central tension that scholars like Neil Selwyn, Ben Williamson, and Jeremy Knox have described as the EdTech paradox. The technology that promises liberation often deepens dependency. When algorithms decide what counts as quality time, we confuse measurement with meaning. The report’s gentle admonition, “augment, don’t replace human guidance”, reads almost as a confession. The machinery of digital capitalism whispers its own doubt.

Arjun Appadurai’s reflections on “the capacity to aspire” help explain why this paradox grips societies like ours. In India, aspiration is moral currency. Parents see screens as ladders to English, opportunity, and future competence. To withhold technology can feel like deprivation. The smartphone becomes both toy and tutor, a portable promise of modernity. Yet the very ubiquity that democratizes access also erodes intimacy. When every lull in a child’s day is filled by digital sound, silence—the womb of thought—disappears.

Lives Without Screens

There are still pockets of resistance. In a school near Coimbatore, I met a teacher who keeps a box at the classroom door labeled “phones sleep here.” Parents deposit their devices when they come to drop off their children. The rule began as an experiment but became a ritual. She told me that in a year, she saw children’s storytelling improve. Parents began bringing traditional songs to morning assemblies. The schoolyard filled again with invented games.

In the Spiti Valley of Himachal, I spent a week with a family that had no internet for miles. Their children, aged six and nine, played with mud, seeds, and imagination. At night, the father told stories of the mountain spirits. The children’s sentences were long, winding, and full of description. They spoke as if their thoughts had space to breathe. Such examples remind us that the mind grows in conversation, not consumption.

Yet these islands are fragile. Connectivity creeps up the valleys, and even the most remote families feel the tug of belonging to the digital crowd. The question is not whether screens will come, but how we will live with them.

The Economy of Time Poverty

To blame parents alone is to miss the structural story. Dual-earner households, long commutes, and precarious jobs have created what sociologists call time poverty. In the absence of affordable childcare and safe play spaces, devices fill the gap. The market exploits this fatigue. Apps promise learning, calm, or sleep. The burden of developmental justice, once a collective responsibility, has been privatized to individual screens.

The anthropologist Allison Pugh wrote that middle-class parents buy toys not for the objects themselves but to signify devotion. The same applies to digital devices. Handing a child a tablet becomes a token of care, proof of keeping up. The paradox is that love, mediated through consumption, erodes the very attention love requires.

In India, this contradiction plays out vividly. A mother in Lucknow told me she keeps two phones: one for work, one for her three-year-old. “He does not eat without it,” she said. The videos are in English because she believes early exposure will help his schooling. Yet the same child cannot say a full sentence in Hindi. The digital divide has inverted: not between rich and poor, but between presence and distraction.

From Information to Habit Governance

Molina’s report offers a framework of habit formation that resembles corporate wellness manuals. Identify triggers, replace them with cues, build accountability. It may help some families, but it also signals how deeply policy has internalized behavioral logic. The challenge is not ignorance but inertia. Families know screens harm; they lack structures to resist.

The shift from information to habit mirrors what Michel Foucault once described as governmentality: the subtle shaping of conduct through norms rather than laws. Parenting becomes a site of policy intervention, complete with metrics. Some nations now track “screen hygiene” alongside nutrition and vaccination. What began as health advice evolves into digital citizenship.

Developmental Justice in the Global South

Perhaps the most significant contribution of Molina’s study is its geographic humility. The data come not from Silicon Valley but from Chandigarh, Selangor, Ceará, and Addis Ababa. It recognizes that in much of the world, the debate is not about excessive choice but about constrained lives. Parents rely on devices because they cannot rely on the state. Public parks are unsafe. Childcare is unaffordable. Urban planning forgets play. When the Indian government announces the introduction of AI from Grade 3, the issue is not only pedagogy but justice: whose childhoods are being reprogrammed, and at what cost.

During my fieldwork in Delhi, I met women who said they let children watch videos because they feared sending them outdoors. One mother whispered, “At least I can see him on the sofa.” Fear, not laziness, fuels the digital babysitter. Safety has replaced freedom as the organizing principle of early childhood. The sociologist Frank Furedi once argued that a risk-averse society produces anxious citizens. We are now raising digitally dependent ones.

What Screens Replace

The most profound insight in Molina’s work is epistemic. Screen time is not simply time on devices; it is displacement time. Every minute of passive watching replaces conversation, outdoor play, storytelling, touch, rest. The first curriculum of life is not digital literacy but attentive presence. Neuroscientists now show that eye contact and shared rhythm build the architecture for empathy. When replaced by pixels, the architecture remains incomplete.

This is not nostalgia for a pre-digital past. It is recognition of what developmental psychology and anthropology have long known: that culture transmits through interaction. Language is not merely learned; it is lived. In many Indian households, grandparents once served as oral archives. Their stories carried memory and morality. As families fragment and migrate, screens fill the void with global content that is linguistically rich but emotionally hollow.

Beyond Panic

Some will accuse critics like Haidt or Molina of moral panic. But panic implies disproportion. The evidence now suggests otherwise. Studies link early screen exposure to delayed speech, disrupted sleep cycles, and shorter attention spans. Even physical posture changes: children slump forward, their necks bent in what doctors call “tech-neck.” The body mirrors the medium.

Yet the answer cannot be prohibition. To ban screens entirely is to ignore their role as modern kin. Instead, we need what anthropologist Tim Ingold might call “correspondence” rather than control; a way of being with technology that acknowledges mutual influence. The goal is not zero screen time but meaningful screen time embedded within a human ecology of play, talk, and care.

The Return of Conversation

There are glimmers of rethinking. In Japan, the Tokkatsu model of schooling emphasizes collective routines and social interaction. In Finland, kindergartens treat outdoor play as pedagogy. In parts of Kerala, teachers trained by KITE (Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education) use technology not as a substitute but as a supplement, integrating it within group activities rather than solitary viewing. These practices remind us that the question is not whether technology belongs in childhood but how it is situated—socially, spatially, ethically.

Back in Bengaluru, my distant relative’s son is slowly learning to speak. His therapist encourages daily storytelling, even in broken words. The parents now keep the tablet locked until evening. They read picture books together. Progress is slow but real. What fascinates me is how language returns like a tide once the screens recede. The child narrates his day in fragments: “Car go. Papa come. Moon up.” Each phrase is a small reclamation of presence.

What the Anthropologist Sees

As an anthropologist and educator, I am trained to see patterns beneath habits. The device in a child’s hand is not just a gadget; it is a condensation of economics, policy, aspiration, and emotion. It carries the weight of global markets and intimate desires. The mother, handing the phone, is not surrendering but improvising. The state that celebrates digital inclusion is also shifting responsibility onto families. The corporation designing parental control apps monetizes anxiety. The cycle completes itself.

Byung-Chul Han might say that the society of transparency has entered the nursery. Every moment is tracked, every behavior optimized. Childhood, once the last refuge of unpredictability, becomes programmable. Arjun Appadurai would remind us that imagination itself is a social fact. The way we imagine a good life shapes how we raise our children. When the good life is defined by connectivity, solitude becomes deviance.

A Future Worth Remembering

What would it mean to reclaim childhood from devices without rejecting technology altogether? Perhaps it begins with revaluing slowness. A walk without headphones. A meal without background videos. A story told rather than streamed. The anthropologist Margaret Mead once wrote that every generation must learn anew what it means to be human. Our generation’s task may be to remember it.

The World Bank report ends with a quiet plea: pay attention to what screens replace. Behind that sentence lies a larger philosophy. Childhood is not an input for productivity; it is a texture of being. The danger is not that machines will outthink us but that we will forget how to think without them.

Across India, the glow of screens reflects in tiny eyes long after lights are out. Some children still fall asleep to songs sung by their grandmothers, their dreams carried by voice rather than algorithm. They will grow up knowing that attention is not a commodity but a gift. If there is hope, it lies in these small, stubborn pockets of humanity that refuse to be optimized.